About half of federal prisoners are there because of drugs — increasing from 4,700 in 1980 to 98,000 now. The cost of running federal prisons has increased 1,700 percent — to about $7 billion a year.

“This focused reliance on incarceration is not just financially unsustainable,” Holder told the federal Sentencing Commission, an independent body that sets sentencing policies, “it comes with human and moral costs that are impossible to calculate.”

Republican Texas Gov. Rick Perry, at a March 7 panel discussion on criminal justice at the Conservative Political Action Conference, said Texas has shifted to a “smart-on-crime” corrections system, saving money and human potential by moving drug addicts toward treatment rather than prison.